Blog
The California African American Museum Is the Best Thing Most Visitors Walk Straight Past
Get to Exposition Park on a Saturday and watch the visitors go through. Families head from the parking structures toward the dinosaurs at one museum and the space shuttle at another, and in-between both those spots, they walk straight past a low and elegant building,...
MOCA Pacific Design Center and the Question Everyone Asks About it
Google the name, and you will find lots of listings with a strikethrough. Let me save you the trip right now. The MOCA Pacific Design Center closed its doors permanently on 24 February 2019, after eighteen years of operating as MOCA's West Hollywood satellite. It is...
Skirball Cultural Center and the Ark that People Visit For
If you were to ask a random ten families from this area why they traveled up to the Sepulveda Pass, nine out of those ten would give you the same answer. Noah's Ark. Skirball Cultural Center has a permanent children's exhibition which is so impressive that it has...
Three Uses of the Hammer Museum Los Angeles
Most tour guides assume that a museum is one place and one activity you do once. That does not apply to this one. The Hammer Museum Los Angeles has three completely distinct uses and each of the locals who love it is likely to use it for another purpose. First, the...
AMC The Grove 14 and the Reason a Movie at This Cinema Is More Than a Movie
It is no coincidence that people choose to watch films at AMC The Grove 14 even if it means driving past three closer cinemas. AMC The Grove 14 is not an ordinary multiplex, and calling it a mall cinema is like calling The Chateau Marmont in Hollywood just a hotel....
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures – A Floor-by-Floor Guide to Getting It Right
Everybody who comes into this building gets one thing wrong. They start on the ground floor, wander and run out of steam somewhere between the third and the fourth levels. And it's a shame, because the best stuff is still ahead of them at that point. The Academy...
Craft Contemporary LA and the Case for Culture You Do With Your Hands
There is a whole category of Los Angeles culture built for looking. Paintings behind glass. Sculptures behind ropes. And then there is Craft Contemporary LA, the small museum on Wilshire that has spent decades arguing the opposite case - that art made from clay,...
David Kordansky Gallery and the Very LA Story of How It Got Here
Some galleries arrive in Los Angeles fully formed, branches of empires headquartered elsewhere. This one grew here. David Kordansky Gallery started in 2003 in a scrappy corner of Chinatown, when that neighborhood was the city's incubator for young art spaces, and it...
La Cienega Park and the Art of a Full Family Day in Los Angeles
Every neighborhood has one park that quietly does all the work. On the Beverly Hills side of town, that park is La Cienega Park. Not the biggest green space in Los Angeles, not the most famous, but ask the families within a two-mile radius where the kids learned to...
Marciano Art Foundation and the Question Everyone Still Asks About It
Type the name into a search bar and the suggestions tell the story before any article can. Is it open. What happened. Can you visit. The Marciano Art Foundation was, for a brief and genuinely exciting stretch, one of the most talked-about free art spaces in the city -...
Perrotin Los Angeles and the Old Movie Theater That Became an Art World Address
The neon gives it away before anything else. Driving down Pico through Mid-City you pass a restored 1930s movie-house marquee, lit up like it is opening night in another century, except the sign is not announcing a film - it is announcing an art exhibition. That is...
Saban Theatre Nights and How to Do Them Properly in Los Angeles
You know a venue is special when people describe the building before they mention the show. That happens constantly with the Saban Theatre. Ask someone about a concert they caught there and they will start with the dome, the gilded ceiling, the way the place glows on...
Fine Arts Theatre in Los Angeles and Why This Old Cinema Still Pulls a Crowd
Some buildings just feel like they have stories in the walls. The Fine Arts Theatre is one of them. Tucked along Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, this single-screen movie palace has been running since 1936, and it has the kind of art-deco bones they simply do not...
World Cup Events in Los Angeles and How to Make the Most of the Summer
Something big is coming to this city, and you can already feel people planning around it. The world cup events rolling into Los Angeles will turn an ordinary summer into the loudest, most crowded, most flag-covered stretch the city has seen in years. Matches, yes -...
Soccer International Champions Cup in Los Angeles for the Fans Who Cannot Wait for the Season
Ask any LA football fan about July and you will get the same answer. That is when the big European clubs come over, dust off their squads, and play preseason friendlies in front of crowds that have waited all summer. The soccer international champions cup has been the...















